This morning I headed to the Colorado National Monument to hike down Monument Canyon. Here’s a few photos I took along the way.
Making my way down into the canyon
Looking over the Coke Ovens from the side trip to the overlook
Continuing on down the trail
The Coke Ovens from below
At the bottom of the canyon
On Saturday, Amanda and I headed a little south to Ouray and then proceeded up Camp Bird Road and into Yankee Boy Basin. Our destination was to hike to Blue Lakes Pass so that I could scout out the route up Mount Sneffels along the way for a future hike/climb.
Gilpin Peak across Yankee Boy Basin from the upper parking area
Start of the hiking trail
Wrights Lake and Gilpin Peak
Continuing on…..I really like this photo
Gilpin Peak
Amanda snapped this photo of me
One of the goals I set for myself this year was to hike a 14er. Yesterday morning two friends and I hopped into my Jeep and headed down to the San Juan Mountains to try Handies Peak. Handies Peak is 14,048 feet high and ranked 40th out of the 53 14ers in Colorado. I chose this mountain because it’s relatively close to home, but mainly because it is one of the easier trails to the top of a 14er. From American Basin the trail is only 5.5 miles round trip with about 2500 feet of elevation gain.
Since we were in my Jeep, we headed south to Animas Forks via Silverton and headed over Cinnamon Pass to reach American Basin. We ended up starting the hike a little later than we had planned, but we did end up reaching the summit by around noon. There were a number of dark clouds forming around us when we reached the top, but luckily we only had a few sprinkles of rain fall on us during our descent. I definitely struggled a little from the saddle to the peak, but am happy to report that I did make it all the way to the top 🙂
Here’s a few photos from our climb.
Handies Peak towers above my Jeep in American Basin before we get started.
Hiking to the top
Andrew
Me.
Andrew and the trail ahead
Since I had Monday off from work and Amanda had to work I decided to head down to the San Juans for a little day trip. My destination was part of the Alpine Loop and my goals were to find a few geocaches along the way and get a little hiking in.
After passing through Ouray, I turned off of the Million Dollar Highway at the Mineral Creek trail and started climbing.
As usual, I stopped at the Mickey Breen mine.
The view up into Poughkeepsie Gulch
I also stopped at Mineral Point to take a few photos
Well, it’s just about that time of the year again. It’s the part of the year that I start transitioning away from the deserts of Southern Utah and start to concentrate on the mountains of Colorado. The last time I was up in the San Juans was when I went snowshoeing back in January. I had heard that some of the passes around the San Juan Triangle have been starting to open, so on Saturday we decided to head on down there and see just what the conditions were. We found that the snow has been melting fast this year, and there were a lot more trails open than I had anticipated.
On our way to Silverton, we took the scenic side trip through the Red Mountain Mining District.
Red Mountain Creek
Yankee Girl
